The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  The Dancing Mistress touched sweetness to her lips and smiled sadly. This was what the traditional feast of welcome had degenerated into, here in the labyrinthine streets of Copper Downs. Even so, they were now opened to each other for a moment.

  The barkeep nodded again then brushed his fingers across hers, releasing them both. “You are of Copper Downs, but you are not one of my regulars. What brings you here? The need for a scent of home?”

  “A water matter.” She sighed. “A difficult one, I am afraid.”

  He stiffened, the fur of his neck bristling slightly as his scent strengthened. “Whom?”

  “A man. A human man. Not of the Stone Coast.” She shifted languages. “He spoke our tongue.”

  “He knew of water matters?”

  “It was he who named this business. He was looking for the...agent...behind the Duke’s fall.” She paused, choosing her words carefully against revealing too much of her complicity in the Duke’s death. “This is not my soul path. I do not bind power, nor do I loose it. But the thread came to me all the same. And this one knows far too much of us.” Her voice dipped. “I even glimpsed the hunt within him.”

  “I do not accuse you of an untruth, but that has never been. I would not have thought to have seen it.” The barkeep looked past her shoulder, as one of the people often did when seeking to avoid embarrassment. “There is a rumor that one of us was the undoing of the late Duke. Is that what this water matter follows?”

  “In a sense, yes,” the Dancing Mistress admitted. “But I was never in the palace,” she added in Petraean.

  “Of course not.” He thought a moment. “Do you seek aid in this? Or is this your fate to follow alone?” “I do not yet see my fate. I do not think this is it.” She sighed, another human gesture. “I doubt my ability to handle this well, and I fear the consequences of failure.” “Abide then at the empty table near the hearth. Some will come.” He dipped into a slow bow straight from the high meadows of their birth. “I will see to it.”

  * * *

  The Dancing Mistress stared into the cold fireplace. There were no ashes, though there was sufficient soot blackening the bricks to testify to regular use in colder months. The darkness before her brought the man in the shadows very much to mind.

  He’d offered to spare the city much suffering. She knew that the Duke’s loosened power was like lightning looking for a path to the ground. Her hope, shared with Federo and the others who had conspired with her, had been to weather that storm until the ancient bonds relaxed. If the city was lucky, it would vanish like mist on a summer morning. Then her people’s centuries-long part in the madness of the Duke’s tyranny would be over.

  The shaman had other ideas about that power, but even so he had not set himself up as her enemy. Except he knew too much. He knew their tongue, their ways, the hunt.

  He was a threat to her kind. Anything he did in Copper Downs would seem to be the work of her people to the priests and the wizard-engineers who infested this city like lice. He might as well slit all their throats one by one.

  I arranged to kill a Duke so that we might reclaim our power, she thought. What is one more man? She knew the answer to that: no more than another, then another, until her soul path was slick with blood.

  Once more the hunt pulled at her, bending the light at the edges of her vision. Long ago in the high meadows when her people foraged or fought, they could slip their thoughts and deeds together. A hunt was a group working as neither one nor another but all together, as termites will hollow out a tree or ants ford a river. What one heard, all heard; what another touched, all felt. Deep into the hunt, leaderless and conjoined, there was none to call a halt to slaughter, none to direct their steps, and so with the power of their mesh-mind the people could become like a fire in the forest.

  They had given it up long ago, save in most extreme need. There was too much violence at their command, too much power. She had never heard of the hunt being cried within the walls of a human city. If these pasty, pale folk even suspected what her kind could do when stirred to mortal effort, they would be lucky to be only driven from the gates.

  Her claws slipped free again. Her blood thrummed in her veins. The Dancing Mistress was afraid of what this man had stirred her to. And how could he not know of the hunt and what might happen?

  He must know, she realized. He’d just counted on finding the power first. That man took chances, just as he’d attacked her assailants from behind, counting on her to rise and join into the fight. He gambled with lives, hers and his.

  Interrupting her thought, one of the people sat down next to her. A stoneware cup was quickly placed before him. Moments later a woman of the people sat across. She briefly met the Dancing Mistress’ eyes, then studied the lilies wilting in the stoneware bowl. Another soon came to fill their table. More cups followed.

  So they were four. She took a sip of wine fermented from the flowers and fir sap of the high meadows.

  * * *

  The woman spoke, finally. She had scent of cinnamon about her. “You are said to bear a water matter which has a claim upon all the people.”

  “Yes,” said the Dancing Mistress quietly. “This thing tears at my heart, but there is a catamount among us.”

  “I would not question your judgment.” It was the taller of the men, who smelled of sage and tree bark. “But I would know this threat.”

  She gave him a long slow look. To raise the pursuit she meant to bring to bear, she must tell them the truth. Yet any word of her involvement in the Duke’s death could mean her own.

  Still, there was far more at stake than her small life.

  “There is a man. A human man,” she amended. “He knows our ways better than do many of our own. He pursues a great evil. If he succeeds, the return of the Duke will be upon us all. If he fails, the price may well be laid at our door.”

  She went on to explain in as much detail as she could, laying out the events of the day and her conclusions from it.

  For awhile, there was silence. The four of them sipped their wine and dipped into the same stream of thoughts. It was a gestalt, edging toward the mesh-mind of the hunt. It was the way her people prepared themselves for deep violence.

  “And once again, death brings death.” That was the shorter of the men, the fourth in their hunt, whom she already thought of as the glumper for the small noises he made in his throat as he sipped at the wine. “If we send this shaman to follow his duke, who’s to say there will not be more to follow him.”

  Sage-man spoke up, in Petraean now. “This is so soon. The Duke is yet freshly dead. He did not expect to pass. There cannot already be a great conspiracy to return him to life and power.”

  “I do not know it for a conspiracy,” said the Dancing Mistress. “He stalks me, seeing me for the bait to call this power back. That does not mean he has sung for my life, but I cannot think he will scruple to claim it in his pursuit.” She flashed to the uneasy memory of the man laying into her attackers, grinning over the bloody blade of his yatagan. He played some game that ran neither along nor against her soul path, crosswise as it might otherwise be.

  Still, they all knew, as everyone of the people did, that the Duke of Copper Downs had stolen their magic, generations past. There were stories and more stories, details that varied in every telling, but since that time the numbers and power of her people—never great to start with—had diminished, while the Duke had whiled away centuries on his throne.

  That someone was hunting power through the Dancing Mistress now, so soon after the Duke’s fall, meant old, old trouble returning. The man being a high country shaman with too much knowledge of their kind was only a seal on that trouble.

  The cinnamon-woman broke the renewed silence. “You have the right of it. If we stop the Duke’s man now, we may crush the seed before the strangler vine has a chance to grow.”

  The glumper stared up from the cup of wine clutched his hands. “Crushing is not our way.”

  “Not now.” The c
innamon-woman looked around, catching their eyes. “Once...”

  “Once we were warriors,” said the Dancing Mistress. “We called storms from the high crags.” They all knew those stories, too. “If we cry the hunt now, we will spare lives.”

  “And what do we give up in following your plan?” asked the glumper. “The old ways are gone for good reason.”

  The Dancing Mistress felt anger rising within her, a core of fire beneath the cool sense of purpose she’d hewn to all her life. “They are gone because of what the Duke took from us.”

  He gave her a long stare. “Did you ever think we might have given our power away with a purpose?”

  Even in argument, the mesh-mind was knitting together, the edges of the room gleaming and sharpening. The Dancing Mistress set down her cup. “It is time,” she said in their language. “We will find this shaman and stop his scheming, before he drags all of us down into darkness.”

  * * *

  The moon glowed faintly through the low clouds, but the shadows outflanked the light at every turn. Torches burned at compound gates while lamps hung at intersections and in the squares. The nighttime streets of Copper Downs were streaked with smears of heat and scent.

  The hunt slid through the evening like a single animal with four bodies. Her vision was complex, edges gleaming sharp at all distances and ranges. Odors told stories she could never read on her own, about the passage of time and the sweat of fear, passion, even the flat, watery smell of ennui. The very feel of the air on her skin as she ran had been magnified fourfold. She saw every door, every hiding place, every mule or person they passed, in terms of force and danger and claws moving close to the speed of thought.

  The sheer power of the hunt was frightening in its intoxication.

  They slipped through the city like a killing wind, heading toward the Ivory Quarter and the black gate through which she’d passed before. She’d never run so fast, so effortlessly, with such purpose.

  Why had her people not stayed like this always? she wondered. All the logic of civilization aside, surely this was what they’d been made for.

  It seemed only moments before they’d crossed the city to the old ochre walls of the compound, now glowing in the moonlight. The ancient stucco seemed to suck the life of the world into itself, though the trees beyond and above the wall practically shouted to her expanded sensorium.

  Three times in as many minutes they circled around the shadowed walls, and found no sign of the shaman’s black gate. Not even a significant crack where it might have stood.

  There was power aplenty in the world, but it was not generally spent so freely as this man had done. Opening that gate was the magical equivalent of a parlor trick: flashy, showy, a splash of self such as a child with a paintpot might make. But costly, very costly. The greatest power lay in subtlety, misdirection, the recondite support and extension of natural processes.

  It was here, she thought, and the hunt took her meaning from the flick of her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the stand of her fur. They believed her. She knew that just as they’d known her meaning.

  Together they drifted back to the main gate. It had stood propped open years before the Dancing Mistress had come to Copper Downs, but no one ever passed through it. The squatters who lived within used the servants’ gate beside the main gate, and so observed the blackletter law of the city even as they had built their illegal homes upon the grounds. The trail of their passing back and forth glowed in the eyes of the hunt. It was human, but there was something of the people mixed in with it.

  The hunt slipped through the narrow door one by one, their steps like mist on the furze within. The path followed the old carriage drive through a stand of drooping willows now rotten and overgrown with wisteria. Trails led off between the curtains of leaves and vines toward the hidden homes beyond.

  There was no scent to follow here. The shaman might as well have been made of fog.

  A thought passed between the hunt like breeze bending the flowers of a meadow: An herbalist lives here, a woman of their people.

  She felt her claws stiffen. The wisdom of the hunt stirred, the mesh-mind reading clues where ordinary eyes saw only shadow.

  Is the Duke in fact still dead?

  It was the same question she’d almost asked herself on her way to this place the first time.

  Sage-man twitched aside a mat of ivy and stepped into the darker shadows. A brighter trail well-marked with the traces of one of her people led within. Of course, cloaked in the magic of her people the shaman could also have left his tracks so.

  The Dancing Mistress nodded the rest of her hunt through—cinnamon-woman and the glumper—and followed last.

  * * *

  The hut was a shambles. Jars shattered, sheaves scattered, what little furniture there had been now smashed to splinters. While there didn’t seem to be any quantity of blood, the stink of fear hung heavy in the close air, overlaying even the intense jumble of odors from scattered herbs and salves.

  The glumper trailed his fingers through the leaves and powders and shattered ceramic fragments on the floor. He sniffed, sending a tingle through the Dancing Mistress’ nose. “I might have thought one of us had done this thing.” He had yet to speak a word of Petraean within her hearing. “But knowing to search, I find there has been a human here as well. Wearing leather and animal fat. He first took her unawares, then he took her away.”

  The shaman, the Dancing Mistress thought. Inside the mesh-mind, they shared her next question. What path did he follow now?

  The hunt had the shaman’s scent, and the herbalist’s besides. It was enough.

  * * *

  A warm, damp wind blew off the water to carry the reek of tide rot and the distant echo of bells. Even the rogue squads of the Ducal guard seemed to be lying low, doubtless surrounded by wine butts, and hired boys wearing slitted skirts and long wigs. The city was deserted, waiting under the smell of old fires and dark magic.

  That was well enough, the Dancing Mistress thought with the independent fragment of herself that still held its own amid the flow of the mesh-mind. It would not do for her people to be seen gliding over the cobbles at preternatural speed, moving silent as winter snowfall.

  The hunt’s grip on shaman’s scent and herbalist’s soul path was sufficient, even when running through fire reek and the alley-mouth stench of dead dogs. They moved together, heeding the Dancing Mistress’ will, following the glumper’s trace on the scent, using cinnamon-woman’s eyes, sage-man’s hearing. Most of all they pursued the dread that stalked the night, the banked fires of the hunt flaring only to seek a single hearth within Copper Downs.

  They followed a dark river of fear and purpose into the Temple Quarter. That had long been the quietest section of the city. Once it must have brawled and boiled with worshippers, for the buildings there were as great as any save the Ducal Palace. In the centuries of the Duke’s rule, the gods of the city had grown withered and sour as winter fruit. People left their coppers in prayer boxes near the edges of the district and walked quickly past.

  Even with the gods fallen on hard times, locked in the embrace of neglect and refusal, no one had ever found the nerve to tear down those decaying walls and replace the old houses of worship with anything newer and more mundane.

  The hunt pursued the scent down Divas Street, along the edge of the Temple Quarter, before leading into the leaf-strewn cobwebs of Mithrail Street. They bounded into those deeper shadows where the air curdled to black water and the dead eyes of the Duke seemed to glitter within every stygian crevice.

  They came to a quivering halt with claws spread wide before a narrow door of burnt oak bound with iron and ebony laths. Darkness leaked from behind it, along with a fire scent and the tang of burning fat.

  The man-smell was strong here. They were obviously close to the shaman’s lair, where the cloak of the people’s power grew thin over his layered traces of daily use—sweat and speech and the stink of human urine. The doorway reeked of magic, inimi
cal purpose and the thin, screaming souls of animals slit from weasand to wodge for their particles of wisdom.

  That was his weakness, the Dancing mistress realized, surfacing further from the hunt for a moment even as those around her growled. He used the people’s power only as a cover, nothing more. The shaman could build a vision of the world from a thousand bright, tiny eyes, but animals never saw more than they understood. Her people knew that to be a fool’s path to wisdom.

  Now he worked his blood magic on the herbalist, summoning the Dancing Mistress. He had drawn her here to cut her secrets from her. The mesh-mind overtook her once more in the rush of angry passion at that thought, and together the hunt brushed someone’s claw-tipped hand on the cool wooden planks of the door.

  “Come,” the shaman called. His voice held confident expectation of her.

  The hunt burst in.

  * * *

  The four of them were a surprise to the shaman. They could see that in his face. But his power was great as well. The ancient stone walls of this abandoned temple kitchen were crusted with ice. The herbalist hung by ropes from a high ceiling beam, her body shorn and torn as he’d bled her wisdom cut by cut, the way he’d bled it from a thousand tiny beasts of the field.

  He rose from his fire, kicked a brazier and coals toward them, and gathered the air into daggers of ice even as the four claws of the hunt spread across the room.

  Though they called the old powers of their people, none of them had ever trained to stand in open battle. Their purpose was strong, but only the Dancing Mistress could move below a slicing blade or land a strike upon a briefly unprotected neck.

  If not for their number they would have been cut down without thought. If not for the shaman’s need to capture an essence from the Dancing Mistress he might have blown them out like candles. She knew then that he had set the thugs upon her that day so he could render aid, only to draw her in to him now, when suasion had failed him.